“Respect for the Autonomy of Evolutionary Processes”
Although I intend to critique the work on a new blog, Ethics from the Outside, I spent some time in 2022-23 attempting to formulate a moral position grounded in the idea and ideal of respect for the autonomy of evolution. I made a first attempt in Ecocentrism is Underspecified: Toward a Sentimentalist Ethic of Respect for Evolution (9 January 2023), which I think was basically correct in its ultimate direction. However, it had many important omissions, including a lack of adequate engagement with the fact that human activity can itself drive evolution. Thus, I went further in my longest essay on the topic to date, Evolution is Good; Autonomous Evolution is Better (23 April 2023).
This position became the core of what was going to be an ongoing joint project with Mark Fisher. We published the inaugural article Unfettered Evolution: A Cornerstone of Wildness (16 June 2023) and a companion piece in Rewilding Earth, Rewilding for Evolution: A Revitalized Approach (16 July 2023); however, the project never really developed, even though we had plenty of idea, and now we’ve each gone on to other things.
I have since rejected the idea of evolution as moral bedrock for wilderness preservation, primarily because it creates a seemingly arbitrary moral distinction between biological processes and chemical and physical ones, even though the latter can also lead to novelty in the absence of human control or interference (including the initial origin of life from non-life!). Instead, I prefer to think merely in terms of leaving space for the “spontaneous activity of nature” (as J.S. Mill put in his memorable comments on overpopulation and the stationary state).
Furthermore, I will most likely move away from invocations of autonomy, which was only ever meant as a suggestive metaphor anyhow — something to shake up consequentialist-dominated conservation discourse and invite to think in terms of asking how (if at all) nature would “want” us to help it achieve its own ends, resisting paternalistic interference when nature is capable of helping itself, etc. I realize that evolutionary processes are not actually rational agents, and anyhow I’m not a Kantian. In fact, I’m a Stevesonian expressivist, and when I talk as if nature were a moral agent, and there are facts of the matter about our obligations toward it, etc., I’m actually just using language dynamically, to provoke. Haha.
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Other Stuff
Here are some other posts on topics in ecological ethics. See also the articles posted under the rewilding tab (some of which, however, are more related to philosophy of language – my actual area of specialization – than ethics).
• The One in Which I Broach the Topic of Overpopulation (19 July 2022): what it says on the label.
• In Memory of Anholt as I Never Knew Her (31 July 2022): a first pass at an ecological ethic based on respect for landscape autonomy.
• Collected Thoughts on Satellite Mega-Constellations and My Loathing Thereof (3 September 2022): musings on the degradation of the night skies by the launch of low-orbit satellites by Starlink and other private companies, plus general philosophical excursions on topics such as ecocentric versus anthropocentric justifications of the importance of wilderness.
N.B. I have also written on this topic (in very abbreviated form) for the journal The Ecological Citizen: An ecocentric case against satellite constellations (2023).
• …but IS THERE a Moral Duty to Eat Meat? (26 February 2023): assorted thoughts on how best to criticize Zangwill, invasivorism, and what ecocentric dietary ethics would actually look like (like Jonathan Swift, perhaps?).